The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More

Few national security issues are as important to President Barack Obama as reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons. Obama devoted his first major foreign policy speech as president to the subject in April 2009 in Prague, where he pledged America's commitment to work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. In particular, the president laid out a series of interim steps that the United States must take to reduce the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.

December 12 marked the 20th anniversary of the Cooperative Threat Reduction legislation introduced by US Senators Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar to aid Russia in dismantling its nuclear arsenal after the end of the Cold War. The program created by that initial legislation is the most significant and successful postwar effort since the German Marshall Plan helped Europe recover from World War II.

A year ago the Obama administration released its congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) on the role of nuclear weapons in defending the United States and its allies and partners. Defense planners and national security specialists around the globe eagerly awaited the report to see how it would embody the president's commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US strategy, and how it would differ from the strategy prepared by the Bush administration in 2001.

In his famous address in Prague two years ago this month, President Barack Obama promised to "reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy," and committed to making concrete progress toward "a world without nuclear weapons." His critics derided this nuclear vision as a utopian fantasy, and claimed that US nuclear policy declarations were unlikely to have positive effects on other governments. But a careful analysis suggests otherwise.

The reactions of Czech politicians to the September 17 announcement that the United States will shelve its plans for a radar in the Czech Republic as part of its European missile defense system varied from charges of betrayal to warm acceptance. In general, Prague focused on the political fallout of the decision, rather than the system's technical shortcomings, which U.S. President Barack Obama cited as one of the key reasons for scrapping it.

In order to understand the reaction of the Polish government, political elites, and public to President Barack Obama's decision to discontinue the U.S. missile defense plan in Eastern Europe, one has to remember why Warsaw had engaged in talks with Washington in the first place. It wasn't the anti-missile shield specifically, since the main U.S. goals of the project--to defend U.S. territory, U.S. forces, and the territory of U.S. allies against a long-range ballistic missile attack from the likes of Iran--weren't equally as important to Poland.

President Barack Obama's decision to terminate U.S. missile defense activities in Poland and the Czech Republic will be met with mixed feelings in Eastern Europe. Currently, I'm in Moscow. And here, there was an immediate positive reaction among Russians. They have always believed that the missile defense system that the George W.

To initiate war in space is to invite disaster. Namely, the destruction of orbital assets such as satellites (whether military or civilian) could create an orbital debris collision chain reaction so damaging that it would make space useless for the foreseeable future. Not to mention that space debris, some of it toxic, could rain down on Earth for centuries. Even limited aggressive acts that destroy satellites are perilous calculated risks initiated by those who do not understand the dynamic low-gravity environment of near Earth space.

Despite characterizations in the Western media to the contrary, China's official reaction to Washington's intentional destruction of the errant USA-193 spy satellite--an action many have interpreted as an antisatellite (ASAT) test--has been fairly muted.

The row over U.S. intentions to deploy elements of its missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic has the potential of bringing U.S.-Russian relations--not to mention bilateral arms control--to a new low. Russia has disapproved of the scheme ever since the United States first went public with the system about two years ago. But despite sounding angry, Russia remained calm, arguing that it already possessed the technology to deal with the interceptors the United States planned to place in Eastern Europe.